Improved tonemapping with variable Day/Night settings.
Posted: 13 Dec 2012, 10:44
Update: New version up!
Previous Update: New Screenshots added below with higher res textures, better grass, some bokeh/depth of field from gp65cj04's great enbprepass file, and some reasonable tweaks to the environment (that are small enough they shouldn't break the default weather lighting much).
Improved tonemapping with variable Day/Night/Interior settings
I'm running a bit short on sleep at the moment, so I'll keep this as bare-bones as possible. After a week or two of (repeatedly) tweaking my enb settings for Skyrim when one lighting condition or another just didn't look right, juggling a half dozen lighting mods, and trying a variety of alternate enbeffects presets, I just couldn't find anything that was just right...
Almost all the presets I tried could look absolutely incredible, at least in specific lighting conditions, but they required so many tweaks to the environment and sky settings that what might look wonderful under one set of conditions (daylight, outside) would be blinding white, pitch black, or dull and unsaturated in other conditions (say, in snow covered areas, or underground). All the tweaks to the environment settings I was making were also badly mangling the lighting in the built in weather conditions (I know there is some support for altering ENB settings based on weather conditions, but I wasn't really interested in tweaking a huge list of environment variables for every weather type).
Most presets/effects I tried were wonderful for screenshots, but not so great when it came to playability (at least on my ageing computer/monitor), so I decided to write my own...
What does it add?
-- Tonemapping and Saturation controls that don't dim bright colors/white pixels or add too much brightness to darker colors. No more flat washed out shadows or dim gray skies.
-- Post processing that works well with the vanilla color correction, but doesn't turn everything more than 10 ft. from your face into pea soup if you turn the vanilla color correction off.
-- Day/Night/Interior settings for everything, so you can have the darker (or brighter) nights you want without killing your daylight settings, all without touching one single lighting option in enbsettings.ini (which at least to me is a big upside, since that means the default weather conditions come out looking just about right).
What doesn't it add?
-- A ton of overhead. At least on my system (which admittedly is ageing), I lost no more framerate than I did using the default ENB postprocessing (1-4 fps).
-- Any really flashy, eye catching effects (other than the effect of better control over color and lighting).
How about some screenshots then, if you're so happy with it?
Well alright, if you insist... fair warning, my computer is not exactly new (as I've mentioned), so the screenshots below are not going to be a cavalcade of wonders. What they are going to be is a good demonstration of how nice the new effects can look with absolutely no tweaks to lighting and environment variables. All of these were taken using the default in game gamma, with no tweaking whatsoever of the post processing settings between screenshots, and with every single environment intensity and curve variable set to a flat unmodified 1.0 (with the sole exception of the night time fog color multiplier, which was 0.8). The top left half of each shot shows what the default ENB effects look like under those conditions, while the bottom right half shows the new effects.
tl;dr: For those who skipped ahead to the screenshots, at least read this: None of these screenshots look astounding. My computer is old. The purpose of them is to show the sort of improved saturation and tonemapping you'd see in actual gameplay under a variety of conditions, not to look like a still frame out of a pixar movie.
Richer Colors
Brighter Days
Darker Nights
Clearly Lit Interiors
All without one tweak between...
Previous Update: New Screenshots added below with higher res textures, better grass, some bokeh/depth of field from gp65cj04's great enbprepass file, and some reasonable tweaks to the environment (that are small enough they shouldn't break the default weather lighting much).
Improved tonemapping with variable Day/Night/Interior settings
I'm running a bit short on sleep at the moment, so I'll keep this as bare-bones as possible. After a week or two of (repeatedly) tweaking my enb settings for Skyrim when one lighting condition or another just didn't look right, juggling a half dozen lighting mods, and trying a variety of alternate enbeffects presets, I just couldn't find anything that was just right...
Almost all the presets I tried could look absolutely incredible, at least in specific lighting conditions, but they required so many tweaks to the environment and sky settings that what might look wonderful under one set of conditions (daylight, outside) would be blinding white, pitch black, or dull and unsaturated in other conditions (say, in snow covered areas, or underground). All the tweaks to the environment settings I was making were also badly mangling the lighting in the built in weather conditions (I know there is some support for altering ENB settings based on weather conditions, but I wasn't really interested in tweaking a huge list of environment variables for every weather type).
Most presets/effects I tried were wonderful for screenshots, but not so great when it came to playability (at least on my ageing computer/monitor), so I decided to write my own...
What does it add?
-- Tonemapping and Saturation controls that don't dim bright colors/white pixels or add too much brightness to darker colors. No more flat washed out shadows or dim gray skies.
-- Post processing that works well with the vanilla color correction, but doesn't turn everything more than 10 ft. from your face into pea soup if you turn the vanilla color correction off.
-- Day/Night/Interior settings for everything, so you can have the darker (or brighter) nights you want without killing your daylight settings, all without touching one single lighting option in enbsettings.ini (which at least to me is a big upside, since that means the default weather conditions come out looking just about right).
What doesn't it add?
-- A ton of overhead. At least on my system (which admittedly is ageing), I lost no more framerate than I did using the default ENB postprocessing (1-4 fps).
-- Any really flashy, eye catching effects (other than the effect of better control over color and lighting).
How about some screenshots then, if you're so happy with it?
Well alright, if you insist... fair warning, my computer is not exactly new (as I've mentioned), so the screenshots below are not going to be a cavalcade of wonders. What they are going to be is a good demonstration of how nice the new effects can look with absolutely no tweaks to lighting and environment variables. All of these were taken using the default in game gamma, with no tweaking whatsoever of the post processing settings between screenshots, and with every single environment intensity and curve variable set to a flat unmodified 1.0 (with the sole exception of the night time fog color multiplier, which was 0.8). The top left half of each shot shows what the default ENB effects look like under those conditions, while the bottom right half shows the new effects.
tl;dr: For those who skipped ahead to the screenshots, at least read this: None of these screenshots look astounding. My computer is old. The purpose of them is to show the sort of improved saturation and tonemapping you'd see in actual gameplay under a variety of conditions, not to look like a still frame out of a pixar movie.
Richer Colors
Brighter Days
Darker Nights
Clearly Lit Interiors
All without one tweak between...
